Biggles of the Fighter Squadron Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1 The Professor

  Chapter 2 The Joy-ride

  Chapter 3 The Bridge Party

  Chapter 4 The Bottle Party

  Chapter 5 The Trap

  Chapter 6 The Funk

  Chapter 7 The Professor Comes Back

  Chapter 8 The Thought Reader

  Chapter 9 The Great Arena

  Chapter 10 Biggles Finds His Feet

  Chapter 11 The Dragon's Lair

  Chapter 12 Biggles' Day Off

  Chapter 13 Scotland for Ever!

  'I must be crazy!' he told himself angrily, coming to his senses with a rush, and raced back towards the Lines. A Fokker D. VII appeared from nowhere, and he grabbed his gun-lever. Rat-tat! Two shots flashed out, that was all. Furiously he struck the cocking-handles of the guns to clear the supposed jam. And then he tried them again. Nothing happened, and he knew that he had run through all his ammunition!

  Captain W. E. Johns was born in Hertfordshire in 1893. He flew with the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War and made a daring escape from a German prison camp in 1918. Between the wars he edited Flying and Popular Flying and became a writer for the Ministry of Defence. The first Biggles story, Biggles the Camels are Coming was published in 1932, and W. E. Johns went on to write a staggering 102 Biggles titles before his death in 1968.

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  BIGGLES BOOKS

  PUBLISHED IN THIS EDITION

  FIRST WORLD WAR:

  Biggles Learns to Fly

  Biggles Flies East

  Biggles the Camels are Coming

  Biggles of the Fighter Squadron

  SECOND WORLD WAR:

  Biggles Defies the Swastika

  Biggles Delivers the Goods

  Biggles Defends the Desert

  Biggles Fails to Return

  BIGGLES

  of the FIGHTER

  SQUADRON

  CAPTAIN W.E. JOHNS

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN 978-1-4090-2268-8

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Red Fox would like to express their grateful thanks for help given in the preparation of these editions to Jennifer Schofield, author of By Jove, Biggles, Linda Shaughnessy of A. P. Watt Ltd and especially to the late John Trendler.

  BIGGLES OF THE FIGHTER SQUADRON

  A RED FOX BOOK: 978 0 099 21701 5

  First published in Great Britain as Biggles of the Camel Squadron

  by John Hamilton 1934

  13 15 17 19 20 18 16 14 12

  This Red Fox edition published 2003

  Copyright © W E Johns (Publications) Ltd, 1934

  The right of W E Johns to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-1-4090-2268-8

  Version 1.0

  Red Fox Books are published by Random House Children's Books,

  61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA,

  a division of The Random House Group Ltd,

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited

  can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  THE RANDOM HOUSE GROUP Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Foreword

  Flight-Lieutenant Bigglesworth, R.F.C., known to his friends as 'Biggles', is a character well known to those who read Popular Flying*. Some of his war-time exploits have already been published in book form under the title The Camels Are Coming**.

  * Aviation magazine which ran from 1932-1939, which W. E. Johns edited. The first Biggles stories appeared in this magazine.

  ** The first Biggles book, containing all the early Biggles adventures that appeared in Popular Flying. Reissued by Red Fox as Biggles in The Camels are Coming.

  Biggles is not entirely a fictitious character. True, he did not exist, as far as I am aware, under that name, but the exploits with which he has been credited have nearly all been built on a foundation of truth, although, needless to say, they were not all the efforts of a single individual. Students of air-war history may have no difficulty in recognising the actual incidents, and the name of the officers associated with them, although they are now presented in fiction form.

  Sceptics may doubt this. Let them. The old saying about truth being stranger than fiction was never more apposite than in war flying, and I have hesitated to record some of the events which came under my personal notice for that very reason. I would not dare to 'arrange' a collision between an aeroplane and a kite balloon, and allow the hero to survive. Yet Willy Coppens, the Belgian Ace, did just that, and is alive today to tell us about it.

  Again, I should blush to dress my hero, after he had been forced to land on the wrong side of the lines, in a girl's clothes, and allow him to be pestered with the unwelcome attentions of German officers for weeks before making his escape. The officer who resorted to that romantic method of escape is now in business in London. And yet again, what author would dare to make his hero slide down the cable of a captive kite balloon, to the ground, without being killed? Yet it happened, and I have heard the story from the officer's own lips, and seen his hands that still bear the marks of that grim adventure. A photograph is still extant of the machine that rammed an eight-hundred-foot wireless pylon. The pilot was rendered unconscious in the crash, and the machine remained transfixed in the pylon, hundreds of feet above the ground. Of all amazing aeroplane crashes that surely holds the palm. It is almost incredible that the pilot survived, but he did.

  I merely mention these facts to demonstrate to those unfamiliar with war flying history what amazing things could, and did, happen, things far more strange than those recorded in this book, which – and I say this in order that there should be no misunderstanding on the point – has been written more for the entertainment of the younger generation than the hard-baked warrior.

  Technical expressions have therefore been avoided as far as possible, and the stories told in a form which I hope everyone will be able to understand.

  Finally, I hope – and I say this in all sincerity – that something may be learned from the 'combat tactics' employed by Biggles and his friends, by those who may one day find themselves in the cockpit of a fighting aeroplane, carrying on the glorious tradition of the Flying Service.

  Lingfield

  1934

  W.E.J.

  The word 'Hun' used in this book was the generic term for anything belonging to the German enemy. It was used in a familiar sense, rather than derogatory. Witness the fact that in the R.F.C. a hun was also a pupil at a flying training school.

  W.E.J.


  Chapter 1

  The Professor

  A slight fall of snow during the night had covered the aerodrome of Squadron No. 266, R.F.C.*, with a thin white mantle, and a low-hanging canopy of indigo-tinted cloud, stretching from horizon to horizon, held a promise of more to come.

  * Royal Flying Corps 1914-1918. An Army Corps responsible for military aeronautics. Renamed the Royal Air Force (RAF) when amalgamated with the Royal Naval Air Service 1st April 1918.

  Captain Bigglesworth, from the window of the officers' mess**, contemplated the wintry scene for the tenth time with bored impatience, then turned to the group of officers who were gathered around the mess fire discussing such matters of professional interest as machine-guns, bullets, and shooting generally.

  ** The place where officers eat their meals and relax together.

  'You say what you like, Mac,' Biggles interrupted MacLaren, the popular flight-commander of B Flight, 'but I am absolutely certain that not one pilot in a thousand allows enough deflection when he is shooting. Look at any machine you like after a "dog-fight***", and you will find nearly all the bullet-holes are behind the ring markings. The same thing happens if you've been trench strafing.

  *** An aerial battle.

  'If you look over the side, you can see a hundred Germans shooting at you with any old weapon they've been able to grab – machine-guns, rifles, revolvers, and all the rest of it. But where do the bullets go? I don't know. But I'll bet you anything you like they're miles behind. Not one in a thousand touches the machine, anyway. And why? Because it takes a lot of imagination to shoot five hundred feet in front of your target and expect to hit it.

  'You don't expect the infantry to sit down and work out by mathematics the fact that you are travelling about two hundred feet a second, and that by the time his bullet reaches the place where the machine was when he pulled the trigger the machine is no longer there. And it's the same with archie*. Watch a machine in the sky being shelled. Where is all the smoke? In nine cases out of ten it's about half a mile behind.

  * Slang: anti-aircraft gunfire.

  'Every now and then you get a gunner who knows his stuff; but a lot of them don't. Look at it this way. Suppose you are diving at a hundred and fifty miles an hour at twenty thousand feet up. A hundred and fifty miles an hour is over two hundred feet a second. It takes about twenty seconds for a shell to reach twenty thousand feet, so if the gunner aims at the machine without allowing deflection, the machine is about a mile away when the shell bursts!' he concluded emphatically.

  'It's purely a matter of mathematics,' said a quiet voice near at hand.

  Biggles started, and all eyes turned towards the speaker, a small, round-faced youth who was reclining in a cane chair. He nodded solemnly as he realised that everyone was looking at him.

  'Did you say something?' said Biggles, with a questioning stare.

  'I said that deflection shooting was, in my opinion, purely a matter of mathematics,' replied the youth, blinking owlishly.

  A bellow of laughter split the air, for Henry Watkins, the speaker, had joined the squadron in France direct from a flying training school about one hour earlier, and these were the first words he had been heard to utter.

  'What makes you think so, laddie?' asked Biggles, with a wink at MacLaren, when the mirth had subsided.

  'Well, I have analysed this very desideratum – theoretically, of course,' confessed Henry, 'and I long ago reached the conclusion that Euclidian precision with a machine-gun can be determined by a simple mathematical, or I should say algebraical, formula.'

  'Is that so? And you are going to do sums in the air before you start shooting, eh?' grinned Biggles.

  'Why not?' returned Henry quickly. 'Mental arithmetic is always fascinating, and logarithms will lick luck every time. I have evolved a pet theory of my own which will probably revolutionise the whole art of aerial combat, and I am anxious to test it in practice at the first available opportunity.'

  'That's fine. Well, you won't have long to wait!' interposed Biggles grimly. 'You'll get your chance just as soon as this muck lifts!' He indicated the clouds with an upward sweep of his thumb.

  'Good!' replied Henry calmly. 'Perhaps you would like me to show you my idea. Now, for the sake of example, let us assume that a hostile aircraft, or Hun, if you prefer the common colloquialism, is proceeding along a path of flight which we will call A – B, banking at an angle of, shall we say, thirty degrees – so. These two coffee-cups will indicate the imaginary line,' he went on, arranging the two cups on a card-table in front of the fire.

  'Now, I am approaching in my Camel plane on a course which we will call C – D – two more cups, thanks! – at an angle of bank of sixty degrees. Now, by a combination of factors which I will presently explain, I will demonstrate to you that a prolongation of the muzzles of my Vickers guns will intercept the geometrical arc A – C in X seconds plus the cube root of the square of the chord B – C – a very simple equation. Now, if I equal Y–'

  'Why?' broke in Biggles, in a dazed voice.

  'Yes, I said Y–'

  'I mean, what for?' Biggles demanded.

  'Well, call me Z if you like; it's all the same.'

  'Hold hard – hold hard!' cried Biggles. 'What's all this about? What is all this XYZ stuff, anyway? I'm not a blinking triangle! You can be the whole blooming alphabet if you like, as far as I am concerned, and if you think you can knock Huns down by drawing imaginary lines, you go ahead!'

  'Well, there it is, and that's all there is to it,' said Henry, with a shrug of resignation. 'The whole thing is purely a matter of mathematics!'

  'Mathematics, my eye! If you start working out sums on my patrol I'll show you a new line of flight with the cube root of my foot when we get back on the ground!' promised Biggles, scowling.

  The door opened, and Major Mullen, the CO.*, entered.

  * Commanding officer.

  'This stuff is not going to lift, I'm afraid!' he said, nodding towards the window. 'But we shall have to try to put up a show of some sort or other, or wing headquarters will start a scream. What about dropping a few Cooper bombs* on a Jerry** aerodrome – Aerodrome No. 32, for instance – eh, Bigglesworth?'

  * Small bombs weighing around 201b, filled with high explosive.

  ** Slang: German.

  'Good enough, sir! That suits me,' replied Biggles. 'Anything for a quiet life. I'll go crazy if I loaf about here toasting in front of the fire much longer!'

  Henry sprang to his feet and started off towards the door.

  'Hi, where do you think you're off to?' called Biggles.

  'I thought I was going to bomb Aerodrome No. 32. Am I not coming with you?' cried Henry, in dismay.

  'You! I should say so! Sit down, and don't be silly!' growled Biggles. 'You'd be lost to the world in five minutes if you got into that soup. You get a pencil and paper and go on working out your sums!'

  'Lost? Absurd!' snorted Henry. 'With a good compass it is impossible to get lost. Cloud flying is purely a matter of mathematics.'

  Major Mullen smiled.

  'Who told you that?' he asked, in surprise.

  'Don't you start him off on that ABC stuff again, sir,' protested Biggles quickly. 'He reckons he's going to shoot Huns down by algebra.' He turned to Henry. 'Look here, kid,' he said, 'I don't want to discourage you, but do you think you could keep me in sight if I let you come with me?'

  'Keep you in sight?' echoed Henry. 'Of course I could!'

  'By mathematics, I suppose?'

  'Certainly!'

  'All right, Professor. But you leave your copy-book and pencil at home, and keep your eye on me. If you lose me in the fog, don't sit around doing mental arithmetic, trying to work out where I am by your XYZ stuff. You come home – quick, or you might run into somebody who draws lines – not imaginary ones, either – with Spandau* guns. Come on, then. Come on, Algy. Three'll be enough.'

  * German machine guns were often referred to as Spandaus due to the fact that many were manufact
ured at Spandau, Germany.

  Ten minutes later they took off in a swirl of snow, and, climbing swiftly, soon reached the gloom of the cloud-bank. At four thousand feet Biggles burst out at the top into brilliant sunshine, with a suddenness that was startling, and looked around quickly for the other two Camels**. Algy emerged from the opaque vapour about fifty yards away, and instantly took up his position close to Biggles' right wing-tip. But of Henry there was no sign.

  ** Sopwith Camel, a single-seater biplane fighter with twin machine guns synchronised to fire through the propeller. Tricky to fly. See front cover for illustration.

  Biggles circled for a few minutes, grumbling at the delay, then spied the missing Camel among the cloud-tops about a mile away, heading on a course at forty-five degrees to his own. He raced after it, but just as he reached it, the Camel once more disappeared into the cold grey mist. He muttered an exclamation of annoyance as he pulled up to avoid a collision. 'Working out his blinking sums, I expect,' he mused.

  Presently the Camel appeared again, far to the east, still heading out over hostile country. Biggles ground his teeth and let him go. He could not have caught him up, anyway. He made a despairing gesture to Algy in the other Camel, and then, turning, they sped away together towards the objective aerodrome.

  For some minutes they held on their course, then a strong Albatros* patrol came into view, sailing serenely through the blue sky at a tremendous height. It was heading farther in over its own Lines**. But Biggles kept a watchful eye on it, prepared to dive into the clouds for safety at the first indication that they had been seen.

  * German single-seater fighter with two fixed machine guns.

  ** The front line trenches where the opposing armies faced one another.

  Presently the black-crossed enemy machines started diving down, and disappeared into the mist some distance ahead. For another quarter of an hour Biggles and Algy cruised along just above the cloud-tops, keeping a wary eye on the sky, ready to dive for the cover the clouds would provide, should the Albatroses reappear.